How Can Human Rights Provide a New Perspective on Drug Control?

Challenging the moral hegemony of the prohibitionist logic of the global drug regime, this book explores the human rights of individuals to consume psychoactive drugs. The current approach towards tackling the so-called drugs problem is not working. By viewing drugs as the problem and trying to fight them, the situation gets worse. Accordingly, this book operates on the premise that psychoactive use has always occurred and will always occur in societies. While the law is the best placed mechanism to regulate our actions relating to certain psychoactives, the book argues against the stranglehold of the criminal law, in favour of a human rights based approach; one which is designed to reflect and respond to the human condition.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I comprehensively examines the value of human rights on a philosophical, political, legal and institutional basis, in order to elicit their capacity to provide a new perspective on drug control. This human rights perspective is then applied in Part II of the book, which employs the rights to health and religion as conceptual starting points to demonstrate how human rights might improve the drug control framework, and how the lens of human rights can point to different ways of regulating drug consumption. Analysing both UK and international case law, this book develops unique regulatory ideas and insights which better respond to the complexity of human drug use.